Carla Canales has been praised by Opera Magazine for possessing a voice that “grabs the heartstrings with its dramatic force and musicality.” She has won acclaim on leading stages around the world as a performer while also being recognized as a thought leader, advocate, and entrepreneur.
Most recently, Carla served the Biden Administration in a newly created position at the National Endowment for the Arts and later at the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, as Senior Advisor and Envoy for Cultural Exchange. Through this role, she created and spearheaded the Artists for Understanding initiative. In coordination with the Biden-Harris White House, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Artists for Understanding aimed to promote the arts and humanities as crucial in bridging divides through their capacity to foster dialogue, connection, empathy, and change-making in communities.
Carla currently serves as a 2024-2025 Social Innovation and Change Initiative Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Through this role she has taught for the Public Leadership Co-Curricular Program since 2022. In the spring of 2025, Carla will return to the Korbel School of International Affairs as a Visiting Professor at the University of Denver to teach a course on cultural diplomacy. Carla is a published author, having written an op-eds for USA Today and for the New York Times, as well as book chapter contributions for several academic books on cultural diplomacy and soft power.
In addition, for the past twenty years Carla has served as an Arts Envoy for the U.S. Department of State. In 2024, she led a seven month cultural diplomacy project for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, as part of the recently launched Global Music Diplomacy Initiative.
Carla maintains an active performing schedule, with recent performances at the Sicily International Voice Festival, the Gulangyu Festival of Music, and with the Zheng Xiaoying Opera Center.
Carla has been a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities Turnaround Arts Program, was selected by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers and won the Medal of Excellence from the Sphinx Organization, which was presented to her at the Supreme Court by Justice Sotomayor. Carla was also named one of Musical America’s 30 Movers and Shapers of 2018. In each case, she was the first opera singer ever to receive the honor. In 2021, Carla became a member of the Recording Academy. Carla was honored as one of twenty selected alumni to receive the University of Michigan Bicentennial Alumni Award. Carla was a 2021 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard University, the youngest fellow in the history of the program to date.
Carla is the founder of The Canales Project, a non-profit arts and advocacy organization through which she created Hear Her Song, a musical celebration of distinguished female leaders worldwide that commissions new songs written by female composers to honor them. To date she has performed project selections over a dozen times at venues including the National Gallery of Art, The Public Theater and Kennedy Center. The project engages a variety of participants and partners worldwide, including Vital Voices, El Sistema USA, and participants including honorees Hillary Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, and Malala Yousafzai. The project continues to build a category of commissioned songs, with over fifty songs commissioned to date.
As a classical singer, Carla has been in demand for her portrayal of Bizet’s Carmen, a role she has performed over eighty times in twelve countries. Her performance was praised by Opera News as “a well-practiced, sexy Carmen, [Carla] dominated the show.” Other roles in her repertoire include Dalilah in Samson et Dalilah (Sinfonica de Yucatan), Eboli in Don Carlo (Opera Royal de Wallonie), Maddalena in Rigoletto (Opera Royal de Wallonie, Michigan Opera Theater), Giulietta in Les Contes d'Hoffmann (National Centre for the Performing Arts Beijing), Adalgisa in Norma (Portland SummerFest), Fenena in Nabucco (Michigan Opera Theater) and Preziosilla in La Forza del Destino (Opera Royal de Wallonie). As a concert soloist, she has sung Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. She has also performed as a soloist with the Qingdao Symphony Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, and appeared multiple times with the China National Symphony Orchestra.
An accomplished recitalist, Carla has performed solo recitals at the National Gallery of Art, Guangzhou Opera, China’s National Center for the Performing Arts, Forbidden City Concert Hall, and most recently a solo recital at the Kennedy Center. Carla holds dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship, and has appeared frequently in performances throughout Latin America. Recently she was a featured guest artist in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Anniversary Concert “Voices of Mexico,” which was nationally televised throughout Mexico and released as a commercial recording. Carla has also performed on the nationally-televised Hispanic Heritage Awards, and was a guest artist for Vice President Biden's Hispanic Heritage Month Reception and the National Endowment for the Art's 50th Anniversary Celebration.
A lover of all musical genres, Carla released her debut album “Duende” in fall of 2020. The album reimagines Spanish folk melodies with electronics, and was inspired by the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. The album has received critical acclaim. “She impressively merges the specific musical vernaculars of her past and present, and employs masterful vocal facility in order to create a refreshing record that feels entirely relevant in this moment of post-genre art that questions cultural identity and belonging in the landscape of an ever-fragmenting society.” -icareifyoulisten.com
Carla has been a guest speaker/lecturer at the United Nations, the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Americans for the Arts, Harvard University, Oxford University, William and Mary, SciencesPo (Paris), Aspen Institute, and TEDxMidAtlantic. Previously, Carla served as a co-creator and Artistic Director of CultureSummit Abu Dhabi, an annual conference conceived to bring together arts and policy leaders from around the world to discuss common challenges and to develop joint approaches to using the arts to help address major global issues.
She is fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English and is currently studying Mandarin.
